SOW THE SEEDS OF HEMP

Not about marijuana, but the hangman's rope. John Murrel, a branded horsethief with an ego the size of a Mississippi gambling boat, decides to build a slave empire and overthrow the whites of that state before President Jackson can stop him. He has already stolen a thousand blacks and is turning them into soldiers at a secret hideout. And he's committed several acts of banditry along the Natchez Trace including murder. Virgil Stewart, who hopes to marry and start a farm, is sent out by his prospective father-in-law to locate two lost slaves. Virgil infiltrates Murrel's empire, then turns him over to the law, but loses his fiancee after some of his own peccadilloes are exposed during the courtroom battle. A true story as authentic as a hanging, but not as blazingly funny as Jennings' The Terrible Teague Bunch (1975).